In a Best Picture Oscar spitball piece, IndieWire’s Anne Thompson has called Spider-Man: No Way Home a “long shot”. She has this deeply emotional, hugely successful Sony release in 20th place — a lower ranking than those shared by THR‘s Scott Feinberg or TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, but in the same ballpark.

Thompson’s top-ten noms are purely about safety, purely about raising a damp finger to the wind and adding her voice to the chorus of conventional thinkers.

I know that I speak for hundreds of industry veterans by saying that the elite Feinberg-Pond-Thompson mindset being knocked off its axis would be absolute heaven.

Please consider clapping your hands in order to tell this crew how full of shit they are. Peter Pan author James M. Barrie once urged audiences to clap in order to keep Tinkerbell alive — I’m asking the same thing here. Vote for the millions of younger ticket buyers out there, for those who’ve paid to see S-M: NWH more than once because it pushes a button that they wanted pushed before they knew it. Vote to show respect for a film that falls short of profound art but which really turned them on. That means something.

If Blanche Dubois had the floor, she would urge the following to Academy and guild members: “Don’t hang back with the snoots!”.

I’m not talking about which Best Picture contender is “better”, whatever that means. I’m talking about how a Spider-Man Best Picture nomination would startle these smug know-it-alls, those handicappers from the land of stupor. I’m talking about the sheer pleasure of this prospect.

Oscar nomination voting begins two days hence — Thursday, 1.27.22. Voting ends on Tuesday, 2.1.22. The nominations will be announced on Tuesday, 2.8.22, with the ceremony happening on Sunday, 3.27.22 — roughly eight weeks away.

Not once in my life have I spoken the anachronistic term “broad”. It’s been out of circulation for decades, and yet in 2005 Urban Dictionary posted the following definition: “Word for a woman. Less respectable than lady but much more respectable than bitch. As in ‘Man, look at those two broads…they are smokin’!”

Bitches and ho’s used to be (and perhaps still are) common terms within urban hip-hop culture, okay, but broads? Not in this century or even the second half of the 20th. It was used by coarse types (gangsters, gamblers, saloon singers) during the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, okay, but started to fade in the ’50s.

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart used “broads” in “The Lady Is A Tramp,” a 1937 tune they wrote for “Babes in Arms“. It’s also in the 1957 film version of Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey when Rita Hayworth sings “I’m a broad with a broad, broad mind.” Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack crowd almost certainly used the term from time to time. It’s impossible to imagine Ronald Colman, Cary Grant or Gary Cooper saying it, but I’ll bet it was part of Bob Hope‘s vocabulary — ditto Desi Arnaz‘s.

In Some Like It Hot a Spats Columbo henchman (Harry Wilson) flirts in an elevator with “Josephine” and “Daphne” (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) by asking, “Pardon me for askin’ but haven’t we had the pleasure of meetin’ you two broads before?” (In response to which Lemmon says, “You must be thinking of two other broads.”)

All that said, I laughed when I saw this ancient ad for Mervyn LeRoy‘s Broad Minded, a 1931 Joe E. Brown comedy.

Now that it’s on the table, HE hereby proposes that Browne, LeRoy, Broad Minded screenwriters Bert Kalmer and Harry Ruby, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth be posthumously cancelled. At the very least, The Academy Museum (i.e., “Woke House”) should post an apology for Hollywood culture having encouraged sexist attitudes by using this deplorable term in certain films. The museum should also sign a pledge to never install exhibits that include the above.

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The Austin-residing Dylan Wells stepped in today and solved the agonizing missing-comments Patreon problem** that has been plaguing Hollywood Elsewhere for more than a week. Other well-meaning tech guys tried to fix the issue and failed. This is the difference between being a professional-level tech guy and a genius-level one. Dylan reports that a Disqus update caused the problem. Hollywood Elsewhere is enormously thankful to Dylan for “slaying the dragon,” so to speak.

Dylan’s summary of the problem that no longer exists (thank God):

How curious that a new teaser for Guillermo del Toro‘s animated re-telling of Pinocchio focuses not on Geppetto or his carved-wood son Pinocchio or the kids turned into donkey slaves, but on a sophisticated insect Sebastian J. Cricket, obviously related in some way to Jiminy Cricket.

What has a fucking cricket to do with all this, especially a tale that considers the shadow of Benito Mussolini??

Guillermo’s “dark, twisted retelling of the famous Carlo Collodi fairytale, about a wooden puppet who comes to life and dreams of becoming a real boy, takes place in 1930s Fascist Italy. When Pinocchio comes to life, he turns out not to be a nice boy, causing mischief and playing mean tricks. But at its core, Pinocchio is “a story of love and disobedience as Pinocchio struggles to live up to his father’s expectations.”

I’ll tell you right that John Cameron Swayze Mitchell looks too skin-and-bones to play Joe Exotic, who’s always had roundish, semi-jowly features. Kate McKinnon as Joe’s nemesis Carole Baskin…I’m fine with that. With McKinnon, not the show. I hate watching egoistic with horrible taste in clothing and hairstyling lowlifes make their lives even lower.

From Sam Tonkin’s 1.24.22 story in London’s Daily Mail, “Futuristic flying ‘AirCar’ that can transform from a road vehicle into a plane in under THREE MINUTES is certified to fly after passing safety tests in Slovakia“:

“AirCar certification opens the door for mass production of very efficient flying cars,” said Professor Stefan Klein, AirCar’s inventor, the leader of the development team and test pilot. “It is official and the final confirmation of our ability to change mid-distance travel forever.”

“The project’s co-founder Anton Zajac said: “Fifty years ago, the car was the epitome of freedom. AirCar allows us to be free again.”

Three days ago I stated that Jamie Dack‘s Palm Trees and Power Lines, a Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Competition entry, is among the festival’s three best films.

I actually didn’t convey my true, deep-down feelings, which is that in the realm of stories about young girls dealing with predatory relationships and the sexual issues that always come with that, Dack’s film is one of the most shocking and upsetting that I’ve ever seen — period.

I’ve already reported that it’s about a hugely creepy relationship between a fatherless 17 year-old (Lily McInerney) and a 34 year-old opportunist and latent scumbag (Jonathan Tucker), and that what happens would make any decent person gag. Without divulging specifics I should add that the film contains what I regard as the most odious and grotesque sex scene in motion picture history. And the ending is completely shattering.

A friend doesn’t believe the ending, which again I can’t be specific about. But I can at least state that each and every dude in this film is either a dog or a beast. We’re talking implications of sexual cruelty, brutality and animality in every scene featuring a male of any age.

I recently described the plot to a female friend with a 20something daughter, and she said, “This is basically how younger Millennials and GenZ see all white cis men…they think they are all rapists and assaulters.”

I’m not disputing that many if not most younger males (late teens to mid 30s) are animals in terms of their sexual behavior. This view or judgement is certainly out there, so it wouldn’t be the craziest thing in the world for Dack to share this opinion.

The shocking part of Palm Trees and Power Lines is the degree to which McInerney’s character is seemingly off-balance and emotionally starved for paternal attention and affection. Because right away you’re wondering how and why McInerney would go out with Tucker in the first place (there are all kinds of red flags). By the end of the film you’re left with an even more perplexing question. I thought McInerney might be safe at the end, and then she does something that made me go “oh my God!”

You can argue that what she does is not entirely believable, but for me the dramatized horror outweighs the credibility.

Friendo to HE: “I could totally buy that [McInerney] is damaged and would get seduced by this guy’s tricks…all of it. But as the movie portrays it, what she goes through in that motel room is so horrific, and in both that scene and the aftermath she is so filled with fear, that I just thought: The fact that she’s got daddy issues is going to transcend that?

“Her mother” — a good performance by Gretchen Mol — “seemed nice enough, not perfect but loving. Why would she be so alienated from that home situation?”

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Is there some reason other than virtue-signaling that the organizers of this Zoom chat have a sign-language person while they also have subtitles, which YouTube puts on automatically?

Why does this feel like a meeting of super-loyal Stalinist apparatchiks in the 1930s? The “safe” alpha woke-think vibes coming out of this thing are sorta kinda suffocating.